1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to generating and sending text messages via a cellular telephone, and more particularly, to an apparatus and method for conveniently generating and accessing a user generated list of words for composing text messages.
2. Related Art
In recent years, wireless electronic devices, such as cellular telephones, have been becoming more and more popular as communication instruments due to their decreasing sizes and increasing mobility. However, because of their size limitations, cellular telephones do not have a keyboard having separate keys for different alpha and numerical characters.
FIG. 1A shows a front view of an exemplary cellular telephone 100 including a display screen 102, an antenna 104, and a control panel 106. The control panel 106 includes a jog dial wheel 108 and a key panel 110. The jog dial wheel 108 can be moved in three directions (turn-up, turn-down, and press-in) as indicated by the three arrows. FIG. 1B shows a side view of the cellular telephone 100 to illustrate the side view of the jog dial wheel 108. A user can compose text messages by selectively pressing the alpha/numeric keys. The text messages composed are displayed on the display scree 102. To send the composed messages, the user then presses the "SEND" key on the key panel 110.
Typically, cellular telephones have a small keypad having only a few keys for entering alpha/numeric characters. As shown in FIG. 1A for example, the key panel 110 has only twelve alpha/numeric keys, and as many as nine different characters can be assigned to one key. Hence, it is time consuming and error prone to compose text messages by using the keys on a cellular telephone.
Therefore, there is a need for an improved method and apparatus for composing text messages in electronic devices, such as cellular telephones.
The present invention provides a method and apparatus to meet this need.